Investment Round in Cheddar Starts Heating Up

The seed round for Cheddar, a mobile banking startup, is starting to accelerate.

The $200,000 round needs around $38,000 to close, with several investors committing to the company in just the last few days, including Pramod Rustagi, an active angel investor who is a former Intel software engineer. The round is being syndicated by S2 Capital, itself a Y Combinator company and an investor in Coin and Zenefits.

Cheddar, a Y Combinator graduate, launched a little more than a year ago. Cheddar is still not available universally. The company as recently as late March was still touting that it would soon “open up Cheddar to everyone who is waiting.” It looks like Cheddar will become available this summer. Its waiting list is currently around 1250 people.

Cheddar is a Simple-wannabe for millennials. But, interestingly, it is not relying on the usual data sources — or even rent-a-bank-license (Cheddar is using Metropolitan Commercial Bank) — that other banking startups historically leverage.

Our technology runs entirely on the user’s phone. We never handle sensitive bank account credentials. We also don’t have to deal with the scale problem of running account aggregation on our servers, or pay an expensive provider like Yodlee or Plaid.

Cheddar says it has built integrations with four financial institutions: Ally Bank, Wealthfront, Lending Club and Coinbase. The company claims that “it takes less than 15 minutes to create new integrations,” because the “integrations are built using a visual interface that requires no programming knowledge to use.”